Apache Traffic Server is one of the most admired services to have come under the Apache Server Foundation project. Traffic Server is essentially a caching and load balancing server that manages your traffic in an effective manner. It has been used for a variety of caching purposes and serves as an effective CDN.

Traffic Server project is a long running project and after nearly a year of development, it reached the status of an Apache Top Level Project or TLP on April last year. Just a few days afterwards in May, it reached version 2.0 and this transition to version 3.0.0 has taken merely a year.

Apache Traffic Serverâ„¢ is fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server. Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation, and it is now an Apache TLP.

At Yahoo, Traffic Server claims to have handled 400TB of data per day and this ensures that it has a very high tolerance.

The Wikipedia page on Traffic Server further says,

In the context of cloud computing, TS would sit conceptually at the edge of the cloud, routing requests as they come in. It could be described as a highway into and out of the cloud. In Yahoo!, it is used for the edge services shown in thegraphic distributed at the 2009 Cloud Computing Expo depicting Yahoo!’s private cloud architecture. In practical terms, a typical server configuration might use TS to serve static content, such as images and JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, and route requests for dynamic content to a web server such as Apache HTTP Server.

However, some lesser-known facts about the capabilities of the new release are that it can withstand 200,000 requests per second, which is a 277% improvement on the earlier v2.0. Visit their FAQ page to learn more about Apache Traffic Server.

Chinmoy Kanjilal is a FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. He is passionate about Android. Security exploits turn him on and he loves to tinker with computer networks. He rants occasionally at Techarraz.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @ckandroid.